“23 Figure” were officially presented at the Cassina Showroom in Via Durini Milano in January 1979.

“The natural outlet, started with his Collezioni for the table and his autographed Argenti, was the work of art. A great many critics have complained (and the complaint is really praise) of the ‘excessive beauty’ of his silverware, ‘far too beautiful for commercial purposes.

Figures of quality.

Quality of surfaces.

In these Figure Sabattini is master of the surface and the form concealed there. I would like to invent a vocabulary of surfaces, so that I could clearly explain my concept of his Figure. Of course, besides this mysterious surface there is the invention of the object. And it is here that his extraordinary talent lies: in his ability to define space with different forms. As he sees it, space is something to cut and carve into forms, and then to enclose. His Figure with their exceptional surfaces are spaces to enjoy.

His mastery of his materials is absolute.No one would ever believe that these extremely soft forms are created with square sheets of metal with which he knows how to ‘play’, better than little children do with paper. The sharp edginess of his metal sheets disappears, giving way to bodies so harmoniously shaped that one would think they had been polished for century in a whirl of water or by the eternal rotations of the heavenly spheres.

On these extraordinary Figure, drawn out of Sabattini’s imagination and technical prowess, there then descends translucent silver, lunar and spatial in hue, with an active and passive luminosity never seen in any other metal: because it reflects the signs of this world. A creative silver this: musical, compositional, sarcastic, mutable, shaded, elusive, evocative… in which the resonances of metal soften into concerts of figures and colors.”